Apple Rumored to Acquire Ailing Startup Color Labs

News broke Wednesday that the shareholders of Color Labs voted to "wind down" the company, but it now appears it may live on in some other form with rumors of the company being purchased by Apple instead.

AppleInsider is reporting that Apple may be ready for its next acquisition before the ink on its deal with Particle is even dry. According to "trusted sources" with knowledge of the situation, Cupertino has committed to a "done" deal for Color Labs, a photo and video sharing startup.

If Color Labs sounds familiar, that's probably because founders Bill Nguyen and Peter Pham raised a whopping $41 million in funding even before the company launched. Despite the media attention, the company's photo-sharing app failed to catch fire, even after launching a video-sharing app in partnership with Verizon.

While co-founder Pham left the company only three months after it launched last year, Nguyen stuck it out, but has reportedly been largely absent in recent months as a result of "tension with the board."

If the rumored Apple buyout pans out, it will actually be the second time Nguyen has sold a startup to Cupertino. The first was music streaming service Lala back in 2009, whose technology was ultimately rolled into iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match.